We are a Financial Investment Advisory firm which has strict compliance requirements governed by the SEC and we find it difficult to continually evolve our infrastructure of servers, storage and networking products with a staff of two IT people.
Show More We are a Financial Investment Advisory firm which has strict compliance requirements governed by the SEC and we find it difficult to continually evolve our infrastructure of servers, storage and networking products with a staff of two IT people.
It was decided that we should virtualize our servers to help conserve the growth of hardware (adding servers) as well as add a layer of protection to our Business Continuity Plan by having our mission critical servers such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server in a live failover configuration.
As we were looking into solutions that dealt with virtualizing server operating systems and fail over solutions, our IT Manager met Nathan at a local Microsoft conference and we all decided to have lunch and chat about technology solutions that could perform this kind of enterprise solution.
By the end of lunch the IT Manager and I were confident that Nathan’s technical knowledge that was both wide and deep. What I liked most was that he cited examples where he himself had performed the work he was describing, it was not a reference to something he saw on the web or heard about through his network of peers. He would discuss technology and solutions as it pertained to his direct experience and having witnessed firsthand so many “technologists” who talk the talk but fail to walk the walk, it was a welcome sign that we were dealing with a competent, professional not a talking head.
Nathan was not trying to pitch us the whole hardware/software/implementation package but instead discussed each piece of the solution as it fit with our comfort level to research and procure through our established channels and where appropriate he would step in and point out how there may be an advantage in going through him for some parts of the puzzle as opposed to a general purchase through CDW.
In the end we purchased two HP servers and the VMware licensing through CDW, but we were going to have Nathan implement the solution, train the staff, and support the system remotely going forward.
The solution that Nathan implemented consisted of two identical HP Opteron Servers connected to an EMC Clarion SAN running VMware ESX with VSphere and VMotion. The total cost of hardware, software and services (minus the EMC SAN as we had purchased that last year) ran us just under $30K.
We had gotten a competitive bid for due diligence (although we were well aware that this was a great deal) and sure enough a nearly exact match of all features was just under twice the price.
Our IT Staff setup the HP Servers with the remote management cards and Nathan performed all of the work remotely between a Friday and Sunday night. We did not experience any downtime during this implementation and there was not a single event that even alerted us to the work he had performed; it went flawlessly.
We now have our Exchange Server and SQL Servers running as Virtual Machines and there is a duplicate set of Virtual Machines on the second HP box with a “heartbeat” between them configured so that if the primary server suffers a catastrophic event killing the Virtual Machine, or the hardware just locks up and dies, the VSphere and VMotion software will kick in and migrate the memory process of the primary server into the memory of the secondary server and it will now handle all traffic and processing. The fail-over event will be as short as a second of two (if the primary machine has a serious but not catastrophic event) to under 10 seconds in the event a “downed server” type of event.
This is exactly the type of Business Continuity we were hoping to achieve when we first looked at doing this type of recovery and it was the “inner layer of the onion” we needed to handle non-localized tragic events such as a server failing compared to a localized event such as our entire office building going off-line or a long term outage in our area. We have fail-over and recovery solutions for this kind of large scale localized event but we wanted to have something that was more immediate and recoverable from the fail-over as the solution which handles the massive events although fairly quick to fail-over takes several days to fail-back to our home office once the event is recovered from (think of this as trying to turn an ocean liner around compared to a canoe).
Nathan followed up with the training as promised and he delivered a very nicely bound, covered manual that contained both specific information about our configuration and environment as well as a very well thought out listing of resources and references having to do with the ongoing care and support of our new virtualized environment.
We are extremely happy with the quality of work, professionalism, and down to earth nature that Nathan has maintained leading up to, during, and after the entire project and we have begun looking into several other projects to involve him in as we consider him to be the best source of IT “hands on” knowledge that we have found in many years.
I will be using Nathan again in the future I am sure of it, and I will recommend him to my peers as the situation arises and I would recommend him to anyone considering to engage with him on a project.
Dan Gleason
Director of Information Technology
Index Funds AdvisorsCollapse
